Steam engine on Eleventh Avenue, running through one of the
most crowded neighborhoods in the city. (Milstein Division of United States
History, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

Social chit
chat between competing New York Society Swans Mrs. Charles Maverick Parker (Cornelia
Vanderburgh Parker) to Mrs. R. K. Haight (Sarah Rogers Haight) …overheard by
some at the recent January 17, 1855 "Ladies' Ball for the Relief of the Poor"…
being screamed above the music between adjoining boxes at the Academy of Music – “I am queen of
New York society dearie...” “But I am the pretty one Cornelia…”

James V.
Parker (1830-1917), member of the once exclusive Mrs. William B Astor’s society
“400”, son of Charles Maverick Parker and Cornelia Vanderburgh Parker, New York’s early 1850s society’s “Mrs. Charles Parker” in her mansion 96 Fifth Ave
at Fourteenth Street, later home of the Manhattan Club 1865-1890, his will is
being contested per below link:

Thursday, September 18, 2014

(Image
above) The Benkard Mansion, Later the Manhattan Club House. S.W. Cor. Fifth
Ave. and 15th Street - 1865 - Watercolor by Abraham Hosier - From the Collections of the Museum of the
City of New York -

This is a
companion image from the building in the 1850s that Mrs. Charles Parker ran
society from, a generation before the so-called “The” Mrs. Astor of the 1880s
and 1890s and her list of “400”.

Supposedly it was this building in Brownstone
that made that building material the desired sheathing for all future upper
middle class and rich gilded age New Yorkers.

In their
day, Mrs. Charles Parker on the SW corner of 5th Ave and 15th
Street was a competing society swan with Mrs. R. K. Haight in the Haight mansion
opposite on the SE corner of 5th Ave and 15th Street.